Women of the Mississippi: Peggy Knapp

by Mary Hammes, Environmental Stewardship and Volunteer Manager, Mississippi Park Connection

Peggy Knapp has been around rivers her whole life - she was even born at a confluence of rivers in the state of Washington! She says she came to the Mississippi River through education and storytelling in media, which encouraged her deep understanding of relationships to the river at a cellular level. 

One of her first forays into working with the Mississippi River was a documentary she helped produce about the historic 1993 flood called, “In Nature’s Wake”. This was not the river of her childhood. As she reported, she was struck by the Mississippi’s ability to completely overwhelm all man-made structures around it, the magnitude of flow rate increases, and the incredible services the river provided. 

As a professor at Hamline University, Peggy encouraged students to consider all the different kinds of relationships they have with the river - historical, musical, hydrological, and beyond. She saw these same students begin to realize that no other relationship was separate from their relationship with this water. The Mississippi was her stage for telling this story. One particular day, Peggy took a group of teachers out on the water in canoes in the middle of our park. After locking through at St. Anthony Falls lock and dam, the group continued downstream and eventually took out south of downtown. Thirty minutes later, the I-35W bridge collapsed into the same water where their boats had been just minutes before. It was moments like these that made learning on the river unforgettable, while terrifying and tragic.

Peggy is most proud of her work with Freshwater Society, developing a program called Master Water Stewards. She knew that people care about water but they just don’t always know where to start to take better care of it. Master Water Stewards trains volunteers in urban water management and community organizing setting them up to be local leaders. Stewards now number more than 300 in Minnesota. You can find them building raingardens, advocating for smarter salting policies, educating their neighbors, and leading the volunteer program with your local national park (like our Environmental Stewardship and Volunteer Manager, Mary Hammes). Stewards are a direct response to the needs of those who keep the river clean and also a program that meets volunteers where they are at: starting with what people can do and what they want to do, and giving them options to accomplish a cleaner river, which, of course, everyone wants! We are so grateful to our own volunteers, like Laurie Bruno, who are also Master Water Stewards and bring that unique perspective to serving with us.

Peggy’s work has brought thousands of students, teachers, and volunteers to serve the water of the river. Her impact is best felt by reading her own words. She is adamant that, “If we continue to put any other thing as more important than water, we cannot sustain life. Things will fall apart. Water is the only thing that does what it does. There are absolutely no substitutes. If we put any other issue above it, we don’t have a future. We need to question anything that emphasizes anything else over water. This must be our value system. We don’t teach it. And we have to.”